No Cooperation from the Cat (2 page)

“I—” He all but took a bow. “I am Banquo Fitzfothergill!” He seemed annoyed when none of us reacted to the announcement.

“The media,” he prompted, “call me the last of the gentlemen adventurers.”

Evangeline and I looked at him and then at each other. Errol Flynn he was not.

“Ah, yes, I remember,” Dame Cecile said. “It was a few years back,” she explained to us. “He pushed a peanut with his nose—unshelled, of course, for better purchase—” She made it sound vaguely unsporting. “Actually, several peanuts, as they wore out, from Tasmania to the steps of his club in Pall Mall. And when he had to take a ship to cross the seas, he pushed it around the deck all day, on all fours, of course, all the way and—”

“No, no, no!” Banquo spluttered indignantly. “That wasn’t me! That was Hubert von Wagnerhoff—you can’t call
him
an adventurer.” The implication was clear that you couldn’t call him a gentleman, either.

“Oh, sorry,” Dame Cecile said distantly. “Er, what
do
you do?”

“I,” he announced grandly, “am a circumnavigator.”

“A what?” Evangeline looked to Dame Cecile for a translation. Cecile shrugged her shoulders.

“I circle the world,” he said. “I have done it by sailing craft—backwards, against all known tides. I have challenged the Bermuda Triangle—and won! I have just returned from a solo mission to the North Pole to personally monitor the retreat of the glaciers, the melting of the ice floes and—”

“Yes, yes, that’s all very well,” Hugh said impatiently. “But, whatever you’re trying to prove here, you can forget about it. We know nothing about this—er—”

“Melisande,” Martha supplied, an increasingly thoughtful look growing in her eyes.

“Yes, well, whatever her name is,” Hugh said. “She isn’t here—and we know nothing about her. I suggest you go and look for her elsewhere.” He began moving forward, looking menacing. “Now!”

Banquo looked uncertain for a moment. Then Evangeline moved forward to stand beside Hugh. That did it. Hugh was menacing enough, but reinforced by Evangeline, he was too formidable to argue with.

“I’ll go—” Banquo blustered. “But I’ll be back! I’ll find her if I have to take this town apart!”

“You do that,” Evangeline said. She and Hugh herded him down the hallway and we all waited silently until we heard the door slam behind him and their footsteps returning.

“Right!” I went over and banged on the bathroom door. “You can come out now, Jocasta,” I called. “He’s gone.”

Chapter Two

After a long moment, the door edged open cautiously and Jocasta peeked out. “You’re sure? He’s really gone? He won’t come back?”

“Not immediately,” Hugh said grimly.

“Who—?” Evangeline went straight to the heart of the matter. “Who is this Melisande? And what have you done with her?”

“Melisande—” Jocasta’s face crumpled. “I can’t be the one to tell him. He’d hate me forever!” She began to sob. “I can’t!”

“There, there, you don’t have to,” I soothed. “He’s gone.”

“For the moment,” Evangeline said.

“I can’t!” Jocasta’s sobs increased. She was almost incoherent, but an occasional phrase blubbered through. “Someone else … tell him … I can’t!… I can’t!”

“Pull yourself together, girl!” Dame Cecile snapped. “They don’t shoot the messenger anymore. If the man was fool enough to abandon his bride and hare off on some imbecile expedition, it serves him right if she eloped with someone else while he was gone.”

“Not shoot but … He’ll hate me!… Never want to speak to me … to see me … again!… I can’t! I can’t!… I can’t—”

“We’ve established that,” Evangeline said. “But why should he hate you? Were you the one who introduced her to—?”

“Just a minute—” Martha interrupted. “He kept saying this woman was writing
my
cookbook! Is that true? Am I second choice? And what kind of contract does she have? Is she going to come back when all the work is done and insist that
her
name is credited for all
my
work?”

“No … no…” Jocasta wailed. “You don’t understand … She’ll never come back … She’s dead!”

“Dead?” Dame Cecile was incredulous. “But she must have been a young woman. Don’t tell me”—her voice hardened—“she was terminally ill and that revolting idiot went off and left her!”

“He’s
not
revolting,” Jocasta choked. “And there was nothing wrong with her. Not that anyone knew about. He couldn’t have had any idea that—” The great gulping sobs reclaimed her.

“What happened to her then?” Dame Cecile demanded. She and Evangeline exchanged an exasperated look. “Was it an automobile accident?”

“A terrorist attack?” Trust Evangeline to go for the melodramatic option.

“Sudden Adult Death Syndrome?” Dame Cecile was right behind her.

“Hugh—a glass of water!” Martha ordered. He rushed to get it.

“Thank you.” Martha appropriated it before he could offer it to Jocasta. I stepped forward hastily, but was too late to prevent Martha from hurling it into Jocasta’s face.

“Martha!”

“She’s hysterical, Mother.” Martha returned the glass to Hugh, who absently refilled it.

“Easy, Jocasta, easy.” I put an arm around her shoulders and sacrificed one of my favourite scarves towards mopping her up. “Just tell us.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” she sobbed. “I had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t even in the room at the time.”

“Of course you weren’t,” I soothed. “What room? Where? And when? What happened?”

“She collapsed,” Jocasta said. “It was so fast. There wasn’t anything anyone could do to help her. She died—right at the end of her cooking demonstration at an evening class.”

“Why?” Evangeline leaped in with the question we all wanted to ask.

“It—” Jocasta’s hysteria hadn’t abated, it had just changed form. She began to giggle wildly. “It was something she ate!”

Splash!

“Martha!” This time I had been included in the sudden deluge.

“Oops! Sorry, Mother. But you can see—she’s off again.”

“That’s no reason to drown her. Or me.”

“I said I was sorry, Mother.” But she wasn’t really, I could tell.

“Martha … dearest…” She was making Hugh nervous, too. This time he ignored the empty glass she thrust at him.

“So this other woman—this Melisande—” Martha glared at Jocasta. “Is it true that
she
was the original choice for
my
cookbook?”

“Y-e-e-s…” Jocasta shrank back. “Yes, that’s how we started out … it was all tied together. But she … she died … and … and…”

“And the show must go on!” Martha was working herself into a fury. “And I was
second choice
!”

Oh, dear! Oh, my poor darling Martha. I hadn’t realised that it had rankled so. At the back of my mind, Fanny Brice’s rendition of “Second-Hand Rose” began to play:

Even … the boy I adore

had the noive to tell me

He’d been married before …

Martha was Hugh’s second wife and, no matter that he and the first one had been divorced before he met Martha and the unfortunate woman subsequently murdered, it seemed that it had secretly bothered Martha. And now she found out she was second choice for the cookbook, too.

“Martha—” Hugh hadn’t realised it, either. “Darling—” He stepped forward and tried to embrace her, but she moved away.

“You might have told me!” she accused him.

“How was I to know?” The injustice clearly stung. “You can’t imagine I’d be able to keep up with every piece of fringe activity in the business.”

Uh oh—wrong again, Hugh. But when Martha gets into this mood, there’s no way any of us can say the right thing.

“Naturally, we kept it as quiet as we could.” Indignation was doing a better job of drying Jocasta’s tears than sympathy.

“The book was still in the early stages, so it was only known about in-house. Publicity hadn’t started yet, so the media couldn’t latch onto any story about the editor of a cookbook being killed by one of her own recipes. Naturally, her name will never appear on the book now.”

“Recipes!” Martha wasn’t letting Jocasta off the hook. “Yes, I noticed that we had some recipes already tested, but I was fool enough to assume that you had been doing some preliminary work on the easiest ones.”

“I was … I am…” Jocasta’s nerve was beginning to fail again. “And we all really wanted you. Everyone was so enthusiastic when your name was mentioned.”

“And you kept it so quiet…” That was all we needed, Evangeline sticking her oar in. “So quiet that you didn’t even notify her husband—her bridegroom—that his wife had died.”

“We couldn’t!” Jocasta wailed. “He was out of reach. Incommunicado! There was no way we could get through to him.”

“Out there on the frozen tundra!” Evangeline jeered. “Hasn’t anyone told you that we have satellite communication these days?”

“Only if the other party is carrying the right equipment. Banquo was trying to re-create the conditions the original Arctic explorers faced. He didn’t have a cell phone or anything like that.”

“Not even in case of an emergency?” Evangeline was disbelieving. Having seen Banquo, it struck me as hard to swallow, too.

“He wanted to face problems on his own. Without all the technology available nowadays—” A glint of hero worship appeared in her eyes. “He’s so brave.”

“Foolhardy, I’d say!”

For once, I was in total agreement with Evangeline. The man was careless idiot enough to be a film director.

“And I suppose—” Hugh had been assessing the situation from a different angle. “I suppose your company had a contract with Fitzfothergill for the book of the expedition?”

“Well … yes…” Jocasta looked away.

“All else aside,” Dame Cecile said. “One can quite see why no one would wish to tell such tragic news to a man in his position. It would be much kinder to wait until he returned home and have someone break the news to him then.”

“Not me!” Jocasta gave a convulsive shudder. “I can’t! I can’t! I
won’t
!”

Oh, dear. She was off again. She was not only crying, but she seemed unable to stop the shuddering. Or was it shivering? I looked at her more closely.

“You’re drenched.” Martha had done a thorough job with her glasses of water. “You’ve got to change out of that wet blouse, you’ll catch your death—” I broke off abruptly.

“Come along.” I tried again, putting my arm around her. “You can borrow one of my tops. I need to change, too. We’ll get into some dry clothes, then we can drop you off at your home on our way to the supermarket.”

“No! No!” She pulled away. “I can’t go home! Banquo will come looking for me. He knows where I live. I can’t go back there!”

She had a point, but …

“Then where should we drop you?” Evangeline asked the pertinent question. “At a relative’s? A friend’s?”

“No, please, no!” Jocasta shrank back. “All my relatives are in Cornwall. My colleagues are my friends and he knows who they are. He’ll look for me there next.”

Another good point, but …

“Which hotel then?” Dame Cecile asked.

“I can’t afford a hotel,” Jocasta said sadly.

We all looked at each other with that fated feeling about what was coming.

“You have so much room here—” Jocasta said quickly. “And you’ve already sent him packing. He won’t be back soon. I wouldn’t be any trouble—and I already have to work here most of the day, anyway, with Martha. I could be your—your housekeeper. I’ll cook for you … and clean … and do anything that needs doing. And you wouldn’t have to pay me anything. Oh, please, please.”

“Well…” Evangeline was already sold on the idea. It was the thought of all that free work that got her.

And I must admit that the idea of someone else doing all the housekeeping was getting through to me. Our cleaning service only came once a week and there was plenty to do in between their visits.

“Mother, do you really think—?” Only Martha was holding back.

“Please…” Jocasta whispered brokenly.

“
Prrrr?
” Cho-Cho-San and Frou-Frou had been watching with interest from the sidelines. Now Cho-Cho, obviously sensing distress and someone in desperate need of comfort, moved forward to twine around Jocasta’s ankles.

“Ooooh!” Jocasta stopped to pick her up and buried her face in the soft fur. Cho-Cho stretched her neck to rub her cheek against Jocasta’s.

That made the vote three of us who lived here against one, who only showed up to use our kitchen to test her recipes.

“Just for a couple of days while we see how the situation develops,” I told Martha. “What harm can it do?”

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever learn to keep my big mouth shut.

*   *   *

I must admit that it did feel luxurious in the morning to be awakened by the rich scents of frying bacon and perking coffee. I found Evangeline already seated at the kitchen table with her first cup of coffee.

“Good morning, Evangeline,” I said cheerfully enough to annoy her. She gave me a nasty look, continuing to shuffle through a pile of what was obviously junk mail.

Jocasta sent me a harassed smile while flipping over rashers of bacon with the cooking tongs. They slipped—whether accidentally or deliberately, I couldn’t say—and a rasher of bacon fell to the floor where Cho-Cho pounced on it with a triumphant cry. Too hot! She backed off, then returned and crouched over it, waiting for it to cool enough to devour. That was a happy cat.

“Good morning, Jocasta, Cho-Cho,” I greeted.

“Good morning, Trixie,” Jocasta returned automatically.

Cho-Cho looked up and chirped a greeting, then returned to her vigil. I don’t think that little cat is ever going to get over her enchantment at discovering that a kitchen is a place where honest-to-Bast food is produced. Before this, her only knowledge of the process involved a tin can and a tin opener, or perhaps a ring pull, or a foil carton. A whole new world had opened to her when I adopted her and I think I can safely say she was in seventh heaven.

“Oh, good!” Evangeline had discovered a real letter amongst the junk. She tore it open and reported: “It’s from Jem. He’s coming up to town and would like to take us to a matinee and dinner at the Harpo.”